All of Alex's thoughts…abridged of course.

“The Internet is a communication tool… where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.”

As the title of this post so wonderfully illustrates, the internet can be used for a great many things. News. Opinion. Porn. Entertainment. Information storage. And so on and so forth. Toward the end of 2011, I stumbled upon (or was pointed to by a good friend) a few stories of something else the internet was capable of: blind humanitarianism.

At its core, the internet helps bring people together. Whether that be to share silly videos, gossip, dissect sports or gawk at the nude human form, people are coming together in some sort of community. Below, I have two examples of those communities banding together, and answering the call for help of a fellow human being. Who they only knew thanks to the internet.

The first story comes from theCHIVE.com, a site I was turned onto by my buddies from college. TheCHIVE is a website that posts galleries of great photos – most of the time they’re either hilarious pics from the internet, or ridiculously attractive women. Needless to say, it’s an easy site on the eyes. In the first post, a frequent visitor to theCHIVE reached out to the moderator of the site for help. As you can read in the hyper-link, her daughter had a super-rare developmental disorder, and her and her husband didn’t have the means to create a safe haven for their daughter to grow up in. So the people behind theCHIVE turned to their community, and asked for small donations to help raise money for this family. Within 2 hours, they’d reached their goal of $17,000. Let that sink in for a minute. In a mere two hours anonymous Chive visitors (or Chivers as they’re called) donated money for a girl they didn’t know from Adam, except that her mom was a Chivette. Pretty fucking cool if you’ll excuse my language. To make matters worse (for my tear ducts, not for the family), the creators of theCHIVE went back and visited the family this Christmas. All in all, a pretty amazing story of a bunch of humans helping other humans. And there was no religious, political or other affiliation spurring this cause other than the fact that the mom used theChive.

In addition, while cruising the site reddit.com, which is aptly described as “the front page of the internet,” I happened upon this similar story. Much like with Lilli and the Chivers, a young boy’s family needed money for an operation on their son’s “1 in a million” immune disease. The reddit devotees responded, and raised over $30,000 for the young boy’s operation. Later in the post, as you’ll see, they reference other subreddits that were devoted to helping others.

Some people may dis the internet as being a time waster, or the epicenter of what’s wrong with the youth of America. But it’s also a source of innovation, creativity, and even altruism.